Reddit's human content wins amid the AI flood For Ines Tan there's one particular site she turns to again and again for advice - and that's Reddit. Tan, who works in communications, regularly jumps on the site for skincare advice, to view reactions to shows she watches, such as The Traitors, and for help planning her upcoming wedding in May. It's a very empathetic place, she says of Reddit. For my wedding, I've found help emotionally, logistically and inspiration-wise. Tan believes people are consulting the online discussion platform more as they're craving human interaction in the world of increasing AI slop.

Plus: Meta plans to add face recognition to its smart glasses, Jared Kushner named as part of whistleblower's mysterious national security complaint, and more. The widespread protests in Iran have exposed both Tehran's brutal tactics in the streets, where state authorities have killed thousands of demonstrators since early January, and extreme measures to block access to the global internet. As it has done repeatedly in the past, the Iranian regime cut off the country's residents from the global internet during the latest anti-government uprising. But it also shut down access to the country's intranet, known as the National Information Network, which new research found is becoming a mechanism of constant and pervasive surveillance that may ultimately be the only way Iranians can get online. The last remaining major nuclear weapons treaty between the United States and Russia just expired.

From small publishers to US federal agencies, websites are reporting unusual spikes in automated traffic linked to IP addresses in Lanzhou, China. For a brief moment in October, Alejandro Quintero thought he had made it big in China . The Bogotá-based data analyst owns and manages a website that publishes articles about paranormal activities, like ghosts and aliens. The content is written in "Spanglish," he says, and was never intended for an Asian audience. But last fall, Quintero's site suddenly began receiving a large volume of visits from China and Singapore.

There have always been two sides to the Meta CEO. But since the beginning of Trump's second term, the nice side has taken a back seat. Ruthlessness is now the name of the game. January 31, 2024, is an uncomfortable day in Washington. An icy wind is whistling around the corners of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, right next to the Capitol. Inside, the atmosphere is not much more welcoming. Indeed, it feels downright hostile. In the large hall, women and men are holding up signs - silent, in mourning and protest. On them are pictures of girls and boys, 12, 13, 14, 15 years old. Harassed, sexually abused, mistreated on social networks on the internet. Many of the children have died from the consequences. And the man primarily to blame is said to be the one sitting in a blue suit in the front row: Mark Zuckerberg, 39 years old at the time. His usually radiant boyish face is expressionless.

Iran's Digital Surveillance Machine Is Almost Complete After more than 15 years of draconian measures, culminating in an ongoing internet shutdown, the Iranian regime seems to be staggering toward its digital surveillance endgame. Iranian protesters gather on Enghelab (Revolution) Street during a demonstration in Tehran on January 8, 2026. Over the past four weeks, the Iranian government completely shut down connections to the global internet while its forces killed thousands of anti-regime protesters around the country. The shutdown follows years of Tehran imposing connectivity filtering, digital curfews, and total blackouts as part of previous attempts to quell unrest. Over more than 15 years, the regime has developed technological and systemic mechanisms to fundamentally control connectivity in the country--including an internal Iranian intranet known as the National Information Network (NIN).

The viral social network for bots reveals as much about our own current mania for AI as it does about the future of agents. For a few days this week the hottest new hangout on the internet was a vibe-coded Reddit clone called Moltbook, which billed itself as a social network for bots. As the website's tagline puts it: "Where AI agents share, discuss, and upvote. Launched on January 28 by Matt Schlicht, a US tech entrepreneur, Moltbook went viral in a matter of hours. Schlicht's idea was to make a place where instances of a free open-source LLM-powered agent known as OpenClaw (formerly known as ClawdBot, then Moltbot), released in November by the Australian software engineer Peter Steinberger, could come together and do whatever they wanted. More than 1.7 million agents now have accounts. Between them they have published more than 250,000 posts and left more than 8.5 million comments (according to Moltbook). Those numbers are climbing by the minute. Moltbook soon filled up with ...

New data shows AI bots pushing deeper into the web, prompting publishers to roll out more aggressive defenses. The viral virtual assistant OpenClaw--formerly known as Moltbot, and before that Clawdbot--is a symbol of a broader revolution underway that could fundamentally alter how the internet functions. Instead of a place primarily inhabited by humans, the web may very soon be dominated by autonomous AI bots. A new report measuring bot activity on the web, as well as related data shared with WIRED by the internet infrastructure company Akamai, shows that AI bots already account for a meaningful share of web traffic. The findings also shed light on an increasingly sophisticated arms race unfolding as bots deploy clever tactics to bypass website defenses meant to keep them out.

Plus: TikTok won't be heading to court this week The first human test of a rejuvenation method will begin "shortly" Life Biosciences, a small Boston startup founded by Harvard professor and life-extension evangelist David Sinclair, has won FDA approval to proceed with the first targeted attempt at age reversal in human volunteers. The company plans to try to treat eye disease with a radical rejuvenation concept called "reprogramming" that has recently attracted hundreds of millions in investment for Silicon Valley firms like Altos Labs, New Limit, and Retro Biosciences, backed by many of the biggest names in tech. Today, an estimated 2.2 billion people still have either limited or no access to the internet, largely because they live in remote places. But that number could drop this year, thanks to tests of stratospheric airships, uncrewed aircraft, and other high-altitude platforms for internet delivery. Although Google shuttered its high-profile internet balloon project Loon in 2021, work on other kinds of high-altitude platform stations has continued behind the scenes. Now, several companies claim they have solved Loon's problems--and are getting ready to prove the tech's internet beaming potential starting this year.

High-altitude platforms could help connect over 2 billion people around the world who are still offline. Today, an estimated 2.2 billion people But that number could drop this year, thanks to tests of stratospheric airships, uncrewed aircraft, and other high-altitude platforms for internet delivery. Even with nearly 10,000 active Starlink satellites in orbit and the OneWeb constellation of 650 satellites, solid internet coverage is not a given across vast swathes of the planet. One of the most prominent efforts to plug the connectivity gap was Google X's Loon project . Launched in 2011, it aimed to deliver access using high-altitude balloons stationed above predetermined spots on Earth. But the project faced literal headwinds--the Loons kept drifting away and new ones had to be released constantly, making the venture economically unfeasible.

You've Never Heard of China's Greatest Sci-Fi Novel Thousands of authors. is barely known outside China--but it contains the secret to the country's modernization and malaise. Ma Qianzhu was unsatisfied with Chinese progress. An engineer at a large state-owned enterprise, he belonged to a generation that grew up believing engineering is destiny, that China's future would be built, bolt by bolt, by people like him. Then Ma discovered something extraordinary: a wormhole to the late Ming Dynasty. With more than 500 peers, he commandeered a ship and traveled back in time 400 years, to a preindustrial China wracked by foreign invasion and internal decay. Their mission: trigger an industrial revolution in the past that would, in the future, make modern China great (again).